Monday, September 26, 2016

A recently published study
of four ways that the U.S. and China may engage in war seems at first
to warn against the high human and economic costs of all four kinds of
engagement. The study by RAND Corporation, sponsored by the U.S. Army,
does state that it “reinforce[s] the widely held view that a Sino-U.S.
war would be so harmful that both states should place a very high
priority on avoiding one.” And it does repeatedly warn that various
prevailing conditions are pressuring both sides to rush and strike
first, fearing that if it delays initiating war, they would lose much of
their capacity to strike, a highly destabilizing configuration.

A reading of the study, however, is likely to leave readers with the
sense that the U.S. will fare much better than China in whatever form
the war takes. This observation, which runs throughout the report, is
likely to embolden those in the U.S. who believe that a Sino-U.S. war is
inevitable, and hence call for more preparations for such a
confrontation, and – in some cases – for the U.S. to strike first. This
side effect is deeply regrettable, given that this favorable (at least
for Americans) assessment of the results of the war, as we shall see
shortly, is based on rather dubious assumptions.

A Brief but Severe war would last “a week or so” and would
involve selective U.S. strikes on China. In this scenario,
military-operational exigencies necessitate a fast-paced, intense
conflict. Such a conflict would asymmetrically harm China, because
China’s economy would be severely disrupted, with significant
aftershocks, and U.S. counterforce capabilities would steadily degrade
China’s anti-access, area denial (A2AD) capabilities, while U.S. losses
would drop off as China’s A2AD suffered.

A Long and Severe war, the authors estimate that the
conflict would last “a year or so,” and it would likely involve Japan
and other U.S. allies. In this war, the losses suffered by both sides
make compromises harder than in the brief war. They add that the
mounting military losses would weaken the legitimacy of the Chinese
state and China’s economy would be harmed “disproportionately and
badly.” The authors hence conclude that “the economic, domestic, and
international effects of a long, severe conflict work against China.”

In a Brief and Mild conflict, hostilities might be
triggered by a miscalculation or an incident involving a third party,
but political leaders would withhold authorization for major attacks on
opposing forces. The authors conclude that the conflict could be ended
before causing major damage, and that there would be only minor losses
on each side. A critical distinction between the “Intense” and “Mild”
scenarios is that the former involves U.S. strikes on Chinese soil,
whereas the latter does not.

In a Long but Mild conflict, the leaders of each country
might agree to contain the fighting, but not to end the conflict. If the
losses remained low on each side, the conflict could drag on for a year
or so, as each side’s leaders decide that the conflict is “politically
sustainable” and don’t want to lose domestic legitimacy by conceding.
The authors believe that “even with fighting limited, economic losses
would grow, especially for China.” Separatist movements within China
might try to exploit the ongoing interstate conflict to advance their
aims.

In all four scenarios the report assumes that because China has next
to no capabilities to strike the U.S. homeland, and because the war is
assumed to be confined to the Western Pacific and to conventional
forces, that China will suffer much more from the war than the U.S. The
authors add:

“In sum, the economic harm caused by a Sino-U.S. war,
unless brief or mild, would be substantially greater to China than to
the United States, an asymmetry likely to persist if not grow by 2025.”

The authors explicitly state that they have not included the effects
of a possible nuclear war in their analysis [p.29]. They argue that
China is unlikely to resort to use of its nuclear arms, even if it will
be losing what the RAND authors call a long and severe war, and they
describe the possibility of the U.S. initiating a nuclear conflict as
“far-fetched” [p.31].

The probability of this kind of escalation may
indeed be small, but it is certainly not nil, and the disutility is so
immense that it merits greater consideration than it is given in this
report. One further notes as both sides are developing very high yield
conventional explosives and low yield nuclear ones, the line between
these two kinds of arms is blurring and the danger that it will crossed
is increasing.

Moreover, many who observe
that all assumptions and scenarios about how a war will unfold, hold
only until the first missile is lobbed.

Nor can one take for granted that the domestic political cost of war
will be much higher for China than for the United States. Americans are
very war weary, less willing to make sacrifices, and more able to
effectively express their opposition to another war in a faraway country
than the Chinese people.

The authors’ title for the paper has echoes that may well not have
been intended. They argue that one must think more about what kind of
war to fight with China, in order to avoid the worst kind. The title
though evokes Herman Kahn’s notorious book Thinking about the Unthinkable,
which sought to make an all-out nuclear war more acceptable – to
Americans. The RAND report’s unintended effect may well make war more
likely, given its assumptions that China will be unable to lay a glove
on the U.S. homeland , while China would suffer greatly in military,
economic, and political terms.

The report does not include even a hint as to what such a war will
accomplish, what it will lead to: the U.S. occupying China and
“rebuilding it”?

Introduce a regime change that will end with a
government more favorable to the U.S.?

Given America’s recent
nation-building experiences in much smaller states in the Middle East,
one cannot but wonder. One may well say, this was not what RAND asked
the authors to study. However one cannot assess a war, or compare one
kind to another, without discussing what kind of China we will have to
contend with once we win (assuming we do).

If the expected end state is
akin to what we now have in Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, one may well
conclude that we should avoid any and all the wars RAND has laid out.

1 comments:

The most probable conflict is a nuclear war, and China is much more survivable than the US. Nuclear strikes on American bases in Japan, South Korean, Guam and Hawaii are a certainty, even if strikes on homeland targets do not occur. That would severely degrade or even eliminate American conventional superiority.

In a conventional war, China would occupy the Korean peninsula and install a puppet regime there. It would also retake Taiwan.

It should be noted that there would be Russian involvement, too, both in Asia and Europe.

The Rand report itself is a major destabilizing factor as it might inspire adventurism in the American ruling class.

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